Unchanged
by AmbiAmpersandy
Summary: A reunion that went wrong in all sorts of ways. What defines family? Are we judged by our past, or our future? Do second chances ever count? Major AU with a bit too much purple prose. This one's actually planned to be multi-chaptered, so stick around, but be warned - I will not update often. The rating may go up for some pretty heavy violence in future.


The thought hits me like a storm, sudden as lightning, heavy as thunderclouds. With it the whole sky seems to dim. My body grows weak, my head clears. A jagged breath spills out of my mouth.

_I'm going to die._

My eyes are wide, staring, my skin as hot as boiling pitch and my hair scathing whips in the wind. Screams fill my ears - but whether they're mine, whether they're imagined, I can't tell. I'm utterly motionless. I don't move, don't blink, sprawled on the simmering carpet like a broken toy, silent, still, the rain clawing at my face, the world ablaze around me. And there, in the bowels of hell, I realise that I'm going to die.

A thousand tiny needles are tearing through the sky, like acid darts, like ice-tipped arrows - biting into my skin, washing away the blood, and doing nothing to calm the blaze. A monstrous gale screams through the fields and trees, through the grotesque forms the metal creates, nearly turning the downpour on its side. Such a force should have put the flames out long ago, I'm sure.

But it only grows larger.

I can see it now, in the corner of my eye, stretching up its hellish talons to the wall of clouds above. It's more than double the height of the wreckage already and glowing with white-red fervour, livid, lucid, a beast from a nightmare world - but it doesn't roar. It doesn't cry. Silent, deadly, it stalks towards me an inch at a time.

_I need to run,_ I sob, I shriek in my head. Why am I not running? I don't care that I can't feel my legs. That doesn't matter. I need to get away. _Why am I not running?_ I could drag myself away with my remaining arm, I could shuffle further down the aisle, I could -

I can't. I can't move. I can't flee, I can't run, _I'm going to die._

That thought, that thunderstorm of a thought, echoing in my head. I know it's true. I know how it's going to happen. I know that it's going to happen soon.

And it just had to happen to me.

The screams in my head grow louder, louder, making me want to shut my eyes and box my ears till I turn deaf. The fire licks at my feet. I feel like I've been dropped in the sun, but the rain is still frozen razors against my skin - I'm caught between two opposites, and if one doesn't kill me, the other most certainly will.

It doesn't seem real. The blanket of roiling clouds looming up high, dark as ink, spinning, bubbling, are the scenery of a doomsday movie. The fire - the fire is ferocious like nothing I've ever seen. The forest around me is idyllic in its dance, dream-like in its serenity; the mangled remains of the jet, crushed and ripped into mutilated shadows, are the bones of a monster from the worst of any world. I'm surrounded by a painting of both heaven and hell, of both the origin and the end of existence itself.

But it is more than just a painting. A stench like none other seeps into my nose and carves out the back of my throat with knives and glass, making me hack, gag, cough up my lungs. The smell of tires in the height of summer - late-night meals, as the meat starts to tan - petrol stations - breakfast parlours - traffic jams, garbage tips -

That's me, I realise. That's my smell. I'm burning. I can't feel it, yet, but I'm burning, I'm _burning, I'm being cooked alive like a pig on a stick._

I'm too weak to throw up.

Just when my life was beginning to look less of a mess. Just when I was getting a home for the first time. Just when I was on my way to see my family, for the first time, when I had money and comfort and some idea of _why I existed,_ for the first time in these two long years, two years after I woke up with no memory. I finally get word of my real family, of my real name, my old life and friends - and on the way to their house, my plane is brought down by a freak storm. My pilot is killed. We land in forest and my back breaks with the impact, I'm sprawled on the floor, I should have died, I'm going to soon.

My whole legs are ablaze, now. The smell is putrid. The heat is ferocious. I'm no longer being hit by the rain - it's evaporating in midair, creating plumes of gyrating steam that hiss like cornered snakes, like fat in a frying pan. I watch the tendrils of gold and white creep up my clothes - thinking, quietly, that it's almost calming. Almost. My shirt curls and browns and glows like ember, like lava flooding across snow-laden plains.

The ironic thing is, I've always loved watching fire. I'd swipe a match from the corner store and set alight a bin, and while I stood there with my hands outstretched, drinking in the warmth, I'd completely lose myself in the forms the flames made; they were like fluttering stars, like foxes' tails dancing in the bush. I'd hold up pieces of newspaper and watch them turn brown, then black, then shrivel into ash and smoke. I'd look at the moon through the shimmering air and pretend it was a reflection in a pond, where me and my faceless friends were skipping stones to pass the time.

I don't think I'll ever be able to enjoy something like that again.

My skin is bubbling. It's actually starting to hurt now. Like, really, properly hurt. If I could move at all I'd be writhing like an eel, and if I could scream at all, I'd be no less than a banshee. My eyes are closed - at first it was in an attempt to protect them, but now it's because either they've melted shut or the muscles in them are gone. My nose has collapsed. My tongue is the sun, and my throat is magma, and my skin is the inside of a blast furnace. My shoulder has stopped bleeding - my blood's too busy boiling. My hair's all ash. The air around me is an iron poker, white-hot as it smothers and suffocates me like a coffin.

And long after I'm thinking that I can't take any more, I begin to lose feeling in my hands. I don't know whether it's because I'm finally dying or because my nerves have just given up - but I'm thankful either way. I can't tell exactly how long it takes. I'm a desert slowly tumbling away into inky nothing, into edgeless ocean, and it seems to take both years and seconds, aeons and instants. Time has lost its meaning. I measure eternity by the number of grains left between the darkness and my heart, my centre, and eternity is either too small to see or too big to comprehend. I can't tell.

I remember hearing somewhere that dying is like falling asleep - it comes slowly, then all at once. In my opinion, whoever said that is wrong.

Dying is slow from the first twang of panic to the last stutter of the heart. Dying is torture. Dying leaves you confused and alone, nothing so soft as the sound dreams of sleep.

Trust me; I'm something of an expert.

* * *

My lips part, my chest rising. A breath. My nostrils flare, the stench of stale air and musk wafting down my throat. Another. Each a moment of relief, a cold flood in my lungs - another, another. For an endless time I lie there, and all I do is breathe.

And here I am. Awake.

Alive.

No fire, no wind, no rain, no sound. In the faint light I can make out a white something just above my nose - snow, I think? - too close to focus on, but far enough away that I can see its gleaming dips and folds, the way it twitches in time with my gasps for air. Not snow. Satin. Upset by my movement, dust motes swim leisurely in the dim space around me, nearly too small to see as they flicker like shooting stars. Watching them swirl I slowly come to the conclusion that this doesn't make any sense.

I'm still breathing, still thinking, still feeling and moving. I can smell wood and dirt and taste dust on my tongue, feel the smooth fabric beneath my skin and hear it crumple as I shift, see it folded in front of my face by the light of that odd glow coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.

I'm quite sure the dead can't do any of those things. And if there's any doubt that I'm dead, someone needs to research the effects of incineration.

Naturally, the first thought to come to my mind is that none of it happened, that it was a dream. A nightmare. But that doesn't explain where I am now. My legs and my left arm feel like air, empty air - I can't tell where I stop and the world begins. I don't know how that could be if they were never severed in the crash. How could a dream cause real injury?

So I discard that idea as soon as it appears, leaving room for the second thought - and the second thought is nearly as obvious, and impossible, as the first.

Am I still dreaming?

It's cold. So cold. Colder than I have ever been, than I ever thought I would be - I feel as if the whole of winter exists inside me, as if the air around me should be frozen solid, as if there was never such a thing as heat at all. My eyes should be glued shut by ice. My breath should mist in the space before me. I should be wracked by shudders and shakes, my skin numb and my lungs aching, my bones crumbling, dead inside.

I could _never_ imagine a cold this absolute. Meaning this isn't any dream. But if it's real - why am I not in pain? Why doesn't the cold kill me? _How am I awake?_

I feel...

Fine.

That, I think, terrifies me most of all.

The third and final solution spreads across my mind like the toll of a bell, resonating back and forth, again, again, refusing to quieten no matter how much I wish it to. The thought that dooms me, fills me with dread. The only thought I hate to think. The only thought I can't disprove.

_But... ghosts don't exist._

I know that's not true. How many times have I seen them skulking in the shadows, floating, waiting, _staring_ at me? How many times have I dismissed them as paranoid visions?

_I can't be dead!_

But I died.

I close my eyes. In, out, a breath, another. The dust motes panic and flee. Abandoned basements and splintered trees waft down my nose, familiar, foreign.

_Dead._

If I'm real quiet, I can hear that my heart has indeed stopped beating. Each breath brings relief but there is no pain if I stop, as if it is only a superficial thing, as if my mind is trying to comfort me by enforcing what regularity it can.I whimper. My voice is odd - it echoes like I've cried it into an empty cave, though I'm just in this tiny, soft, gleaming white space...

Satin. Snow. This cushioning, this radiance, I've seen it before - though, never from this angle.

Never from inside the coffin.

Who buried me? We crashed hours away from civilisation. My new family wouldn't have heard about it until the plane failed to arrive, and they can't have found our bodies so soon, unless -

Unless this isn't so soon at all. It feels like I was alive minutes ago, it feels like I blinked and I was here, buried neatly, nearly dead. But it has to take a long time to order one of these luxury coffins. Longer than a day. Longer than a week. To use such an expensive thing, it had to be people who knew me - my family - who organised it, and they would have thrown a funeral, surely. Longer than a month.

How long have I been sleeping here?

Are they even still alive? Has that much time passed?

...what made me wake up now?

Suddenly, I don't think I want to be in the coffin anymore.

The satin-silk fabric just inches above my face flutters in the breeze my breath causes, but simultaneously pushes downwards like an overladen roof; the cushioned walls around me are tight, constricting, pressing in on all sides. I want to leave. I need open air, starlight, a soothing breeze. It isn't like there's anything keeping me here. Coffins aren't very interesting places; they're mostly empty, apart from the body. And if I could just work out how to do it, I'd drift up through the silk and wood and dirt with no trouble -

I freeze.

_The body._

If I am a ghost, then I, theoretically, don't exist. I take up space and affect the area around myself, but I can probably just as easily _not._ Which means that this body is not real. Not the one I died in. Which means that this body is not the one that was retrieved and buried in this coffin. Which means that, in the coffin with me, are my decomposing remains.

I don't know whether to retch or grin.

I've always been a curious boy - often to my detriment, with the perils of living on the streets, but I never learn; if I'm presented an opportunity to see something new, to know something that few others do, I'm going to take it whatever the cost. If it turns out to be just another human trafficking trap (as it often did) I deal with the consequences as they come.

But this? This is more than morbid interest. If the body's fresh it will only have been a few days. If it's rotting, longer. If it's a skeleton, far, far longer. I can use this to judge the passed time, prepare myself for the world awaiting, to bring relief or accept my peace.

Floating a foot upwards is a simple matter of willpower and disbelief, I discover. I flip myself over easily, a part of my back intersecting with the top of the coffin and the dirt beyond. It turns out to be nothing more complicated than a thought and a goal. I look down. That blue-white light shifts as I shift, the dancing dust making pinpricks of shadow that flicker as my eyes flicker, turn as my body turns.

The shadows convulse.

I want to scream. I'm too disgusted to move. I want to puke. There's nothing in my stomach - nothing more than fear, terror, _revulsion._ A ragged gasp rips past my teeth. A whimper, a strangled cry bubbles up my throat like the wail of a startled beast, and I fight dearly to close my eyes. I need to look away. This nightmare, this abomination, _I need_

A strong wind whips through my hair and I realise I'm outside. It's night. The sky is clear, the moon full. My heavy breaths are nearly drowned out by the howling of air through the trees, through the fences, through the sprawling gravestones.

I guess I looked away.

_That thing._

I'm glad I looked away.

My hair had been short, black. My skin was a slight peach colour, now paling from my time in the cold at night. My eyes, large and round and prone to staring, had been the blue of heavy skies, set high beneath thick eyebrows. I was weathered and dirtied, but young, full. I had a complexion I knew I could miss.

Now - I look over myself, at my hands, my body. It has recently rained, I notice, so the stone before me is wet enough to give a reflection. So I look. I stare. My hair is nearly as white as the moon above, nearly as radiant, leaving a faint trail of light as I move. My skin is as grey as roadside ice. My lips, ash. My eyelashes, my eyebrows, stone, glass. My fingernails are white and reflect the stars as if made of metal - and my eyes, torches, beacons, are the quiet blue of snow in brutal seas, nearly white with their brightness, cold and harsh as the storm that struck me down. I couldn't look more alien.

But my left arm and my legs are what I notice most. Because they are not there. My shoulder fades into a smoke-like wisp that I both can and cannot feel, black as my clothes and barely visible against the starlight. Below my waist, where my unfamiliar clothes seem to join to my skin, a single _thing_ is there, wafting softly in the breeze. I can move it if I wish - the same mechanism as flying, as existing beyond worldly matter. Belief. Slowly, I curl my "feet", feeling cold air swirl around me. I look down and form a black, smoky fist, then watch it dissipate away.

And I realise I am distracting myself.

Because I don't want to remember that body, that twisted, horrific _husk_ of a body.

Its hair was nothing but dust, its skin dirty blacks and harsh reds, grey where the bone showed through, purple where blood had pooled and died. Its eyes were empty sockets, melted away in the blaze. Its nose was gone. Its ears were gone. Its skull was morphed into a shape that couldn't be called human ever again, its tongue a broken candle wick, its torso stretched and convoluted as if in search of the missing arm. Without the legs it looked lopsided, unfinished - a Halloween decoration, too real, too terrifying to complete.

I'm a curious boy, yes, too much for my own good. But there is nothing. Not one single thing that would ever make me look at that nightmare of a face again.

Nothing.

I rub my eyes, sighing out fine mist, and watch it glint in the light like earthbound stars before it sinks and fades in the grass. What now? I'm tired, exhausted. This was pointless. I don't know if it's been months or years - what was I thinking? I'm not a forensic scientist, I don't know the rate of human decomposition. Certainly not on a body burned so thoroughly that it might as well have been mummified.

I just want to sleep, now. I want to go back to being dead. Why am I a ghost. Why did I die. Why did they find me after two years of nothing. Why was I left to rot a dozen states away if they claim to love me so. Why can't I remember anything. Why. Why. Why. I sit down a foot above the ground, head in my hand. Why. Why. Those thoughts, those questions whirling around my mind, a storm, a hurricane. Why. Why. I hate this. I don't know anything. I don't know my own -

No. They told me my name, didn't they? Those odd, unfamiliar words, not a ring of recognition. Slowly, I look up, through my radiant fingers.

My headstone. It's written there, obviously, though I somehow hadn't expected it. I suppose - this is all surreal, all too much of a fantasy to really believe, even when it's happening all around me. Writing is proof. Solid proof.

I have proof.

Do I want proof?

Tiny droplets of water pool in the engraved letters. The stone is the pale, pale grey of my new skin, smooth as silk and bathed in the light of my lantern eyes. It's not a grand stone - small, square, just barely big enough for the words on its front. An apt memorial for a son they barely knew.

_Cruelly taken before his time,_ it says, _here lies Vladimir Masters._


End file.
